"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Friday, July 5, 2013

This Day in History: Jul 5, 1946: The Bikini is introduced

On July 5, 1946, French designer Louis Reard unveils a
daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming
pool in Paris. Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new
fashion, which Reard dubbed "bikini," inspired by a news-making U.S.
atomic test that took place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean
earlier that week.

European women first began wearing two-piece bathing suits that consisted of a halter top and shorts in the 1930s, but only a sliver of the midriff was revealed and the navel was vigilantly covered. In the United States, the modest two-piece made its appearance during World War II,
when wartime rationing of fabric saw the removal of the skirt panel and
other superfluous material. Meanwhile, in Europe, fortified coastlines
and Allied invasions curtailed beach life during the war, and swimsuit
development, like everything else non-military, came to a standstill.

In 1946, Western Europeans joyously greeted the first war-free summer
in years, and French designers came up with fashions to match the
liberated mood of the people. Two French designers, Jacques Heim and
Louis Reard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called
his the "atom" and advertised it as "the world's smallest bathing suit."
Reard's swimsuit, which was basically a bra top and two inverted
triangles of cloth connected by string, was in fact significantly
smaller. Made out of a scant 30 inches of fabric, Reard promoted his
creation as "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard
called his creation the bikini, named after the Bikini Atoll.

In planning the debut of his new swimsuit, Reard had trouble finding a
professional model who would deign to wear the scandalously skimpy
two-piece. So he turned to Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the
Casino de Paris, who had no qualms about appearing nearly nude in
public. As an allusion to the headlines that he knew his swimsuit would
generate, he printed newspaper type across the suit that Bernardini
modeled on July 5 at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was a hit,
especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.

Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation
along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures
prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the
changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European
beaches in the 1950s.
Reard's business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini
mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn't a genuine
bikini "unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring."

In prudish America, the bikini was successfully resisted until the early 1960s,
when a new emphasis on youthful liberation brought the swimsuit en
masse to U.S. beaches. It was immortalized by the pop singer Brian
Hyland, who sang "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" in
1960, by the teenage "beach blanket" movies of Annette Funicello and
Frankie Avalon, and by the California
surfing culture celebrated by rock groups like the Beach Boys. Since
then, the popularity of the bikini has only continued to grow.